Grey LIterature Sources - general

BMC Proceedings is devoted specifically to conference publications, including large collections of articles, meetings of specialized interest and conferences of a cross- or multi-disciplinary nature. Content is not restricted to any particular discipline within biomedicine. BioMed Central

A 15-year-old database of grey literature related to disaster medicine and disaster public health. It has over 8,000 records for reports, factsheets, databases, conference proceedings, webinars, training courses and more. It supplements the peer-reviewed professional literature in PubMed with selected documents from vetted sources that are very important in disaster work but don’t typically publish biomedical journal articles

This resource is a directory of over 2600 academic open access repositories. The directory is run by the Centre for Research communications (CRC), University of Nottingham. Links to various resources are listed on the Country and Organizations access page. Also available is a Search Repository Contents page. These search results include links to the full-text documents

Open Grey, a consortium of numerous academic institutions in Europe, is a database of 700,000 grey literature references in Europe plus links to many full-text documents - technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, conference papers and official publications. Search results are organized by author, organization, discipline, keyword, year and document type with access to the full-text documents.

Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2200 selected websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results. Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance

Lists specific categories of grey literature: Regulatory Information, Trial Registries, Abstracts and Conferences. A tracking worksheet has a list all the sources the SRC routinely searches (bulleted titles) for its own reports. Others listed serve as reminders that they are available if further research is needed or if somebody asks for suggestions of additional places to locate grey literature. [From Robin Paynter at the SRC at OHSU]

To identify and find periodicals, such as scholarly journals, magazines. Provides publisher information and information on rights and permissions. Links are available for online titles and also to publishers. Search for "information for authors".

Grey Literature: Tips

Find ways to narrow down the scope of your search. Some things to think about when developing a grey literature search strategy:

Who are your stakeholders?

Government?

Non-government?

Academic?

Industry?

What kinds of literature are you interested in?

Theses and dissertations?

Reports?

Statistics?

Conference proceedings? Sometimes the entire conference is cited or published under a special title. Try searching for a conference title or an editor, rather than the abstract or paper author/abstract title.Look for a special issue included with the official organ or publication of a society. Often these issues are published as supplements and may have seperate numbering.

What time periods or geographic/geopolitical areas are relevant to your research? Try a range of years for your search. Depending on where the conference was held, and who sponsored it, the proceedings can take 2-3 years to become published. Cited works may have a different dates or vary in title of the proceedings publication. There is often a year of publication and a year the conference was actually held.

Contact the author. Author email addresses can be found on conference websites, via their university affiliation, a Google search will often turn up Currirulum vitae, or other recently published articles from the same author may include contact information.